Podcast Host/Narrator (1:20)

She and I discussed what this means in terms of her organization, how she works with agencies, how quickly tech is being used to handle production for creative buying media, and if agents are truly going to run the show soon or we should all go home. Lots to break down.

Mike Shields (1:32)

So let's get started.

Podcast Host/Narrator (1:34)

Hi everybody.

Mike Shields (1:35)

Welcome to Next to Media. I am Mike Shields and my guest this week is Emily Ketchin, CMO of Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets at Lenovo. Hey Emily, thanks for being here.

Emily Ketchin (1:43)

Thank you so much for having me

Mike Shields (1:44)

excited to talk to you because I don't often talk to brands, especially from your perspective. You know, you're not a Coke or Pepsi. You're one of those companies that people are going to assume is way ahead of everybody else on all technology decisions, especially in this adoption era of AI. But I also hear from everybody that it's not easy and everyone's kind of in this adjustment adoption mode. So how do you characterize where you guys are as a brand in this curve?

Emily Ketchin (2:10)

I mean, I would say we're right in the middle of it. We are a company who produces A lot of products that use AI and leverage AI. And I think we're actively engaged in using it as an organization. We're responsible for building AI PCs and AI phones. So it's really very much at the center of our products and extending beyond into things like an ecosystem. We've set up an AI governance council that we're actively engaged in as an organization and that's really about the responsible use of AI and then we're using it in our marketing. So I would say there's three areas. One is the, the kind of standing up of a category of AI, PCs and AI enabled phones. The second would be how are you using it and upskilling it in your organization. And the third then is what are the practical applications in the actual world of marketing?

Mike Shields (3:06)

So on. If we maybe take those pieces apart a little bit, I think everybody is wondering, okay, this is going to transform everything. When will that happen? Do it now. But then also don't screw anything up and don't go too fast. How do you figure out like, for example, do you reshape all your creative production overnight? Do you go faster on the media buying optimization aspect of things? Where do you prioritize?

Emily Ketchin (3:31)

The first thing I will say is it is definitely a journey and as you well pointed out, you can't go too far one way or the other. But we are huge believers in the power of AI. We're super focused on integrating it across both our creative and production as well as our media buying. Here's a great example of how we're using it in our sports partnerships. So in Formula one, with whom we are a sponsor, we're looking to really target our audiences at that intersection of sports and technology. And so that means you've got to have great contextual abilities. And we have found that using contextual AI and generative AI enhanced creative has really helped us in being able to target and get to our audiences much, much more efficiently. In fact, we've seen a 55% increase in efficiency and we're looking to make campaigns more responsive, much more personalized. The other thing is, is that you've got to be able to use it yourself, right? So I think there's kind of two sides of that coin, but that's absolutely how we're thinking about using it, especially in the world of creativity and media.

Mike Shields (4:46)

That's interesting because I think people would assume sports is. It's high stakes and they're expensive, right? You don't want to mess with that. Like people envision the creative variation thing for maybe having 5 million versions of a shopping ad or something, but you're jumping right into the most precious area of media.

Emily Ketchin (5:02)

Yes. And I think the idea is to make that fan experience much better. Right. Because that's really what fans are looking for, is that great experience when they're watching something that they're super passionate about. And if you think about it, sports is a place where everybody can agree and come together, which is one of the reasons that we find that a very impactful place to be, because it's at the center of culture. And today the world is a little bit at odds with itself. Things are changing, Things are always very dynamic, yet people are going to anchor to the team and they're going to anchor to the things that they're most excited about. And I think AI has a world there where we're able to do things like enhance our marketing and also demonstrate proficiency in the use of AI. And I think doing that in the right way and doing it responsibly is super important for brands today.

Mike Shields (5:52)

So, on the responsibility note, like, I was at an event a couple of weeks ago, I guess the dream is this personalization will happen and be more responsive like you described. But both on the brand side of the media side, there's a little bit of we still have to check everything. Right. Like, we can't just let every creative pop up and no one's seen it. Are you finding that's something either your partners are requiring or you guys still have to make sure that there's some kind of checks and balances with everything you put out there?

Emily Ketchin (6:16)

Without any doubt. Right. There's no replacement for human judgment, I don't think. And that's something that is super important, is to make sure that you have your finger on the pulse of what's happening, how it's happening and where it's happening. And so that is something that we are taking very seriously. So it's a bit of that experimentation and at the same time, the safeguards that make sure that you do it in the right way. And that's why it's so important to have a governance council that includes members of our security team, members of our legal team, members of the organization who are really thoughtful about how you're deploying AI in the organization. Are you doing it the right way, with the right guardrails, with the right levels of transparency? That's been something that's been a great learning for us, and by no means have we finished. It just gets more and more dynamic as we continue to see advancements in AI, I don't think 6 months ago anyone would have been talking about advancements like openclaw. Right. So you have to be prepared for what is a very dynamic space. And to your point, part of that in the responsibility is making sure you understand what's happening. And that's why in the three sort of areas that we're focused on in the marketing organization, the governance piece of it sits right at the center of that. Without a doubt.

Mike Shields (7:33)

I'm going to let maybe get a little more specific if we can, because your products are like we said, you're in the B2B B2C world. Very different than like a hardcore consumer brand. I guess in your mind, like what's the difference between specs LED messaging versus experience driven AI in your university?

Emily Ketchin (7:49)

You're absolutely right. From our vantage point, we are marketing to the consumer, to the small and medium business, to the mid market and to the enterprise. So we have a very wide array of audiences. I would say that because AI is embedded across our portfolio, we've shifted from marketing those individual in your verbiage specs LED messaging to much more of a connected ecosystem story, which I alluded to a little earlier about how AI works across our devices to help people work, to help them create and to help them manage their day more easily. Not just highlighting this processor speed or

Mike Shields (8:32)

this kind of so and so attribute.

Emily Ketchin (8:34)

Exactly. But I think for a lot of people in marketing for technology, that is something that we have been thinking about for a long time. Right. It's not about the speeds and feeds, it's about the experience. It's about how you go from introducing a whole new concept. It's a huge privilege if you think about it, and a great opportunity for someone like me as a marketer a couple of years ago to be able to step into the world of category creation.

Mike Shields (8:59)

Yeah.

Emily Ketchin (8:59)

There was no such thing as an AI PC. There were not AI enabled phones. So how exciting is that? Think about it. If you rewind 20, 25 years, I

Mike Shields (9:06)

was gonna say it's not unlike late 90s and you're building the dot com businesses categories where we think of them today.

Emily Ketchin (9:11)

Well, we were talking about the Internet and all of those kinds of things and people were very leery and very concerned. And what I will say is today the Internet is oxygen and right. Nobody can live without it. So I think it's really important to be able to start out by talking about a category and creating a need and a desire. But we went from doing that to a campaign first. STEADY DRUMBEAT Always on, across, paid across, earned across, experiential. To show the link between the technology and humanity, to build that level of desire so people can understand what, what it's going to do. And I think that's another thing that's sort of a hallmark of technology is you're often in a position where you're marketing something that isn't quite tangible yet because it hasn't existed.

Mike Shields (9:57)

It's abstract in a lot of people's minds.

Emily Ketchin (9:58)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so I think that's part of the opportunity to talk about it from an ecosystem perspective and showing that it's embedded all the way across our solutions and services and products.

Mike Shields (10:11)

I definitely want to come back to that in a moment, but it's something you mentioned earlier. You have to make sure that not only are you on top of all these things, but your teams are using it and your part. All of which again, not easy. You're trying to go fast, but trying to get it right. Things are changing. Have you found how to totally revamp your marketing organization? Are you pushing your agency partners to do that? Are you going to new partners? What does that look like?

Emily Ketchin (10:33)

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that AI is absolutely reshaping how work gets done across our organization and particularly how our teams operate and collaborate together. The biggest shift I would say is moving, you know, what used to be very linear. I'll call it workflows to AI assisted ways of working. You know, something that took you weeks to do can now be done in hours. Which changes how you prioritize your work and how you collaborate to really deliver creative storytelling.

Mike Shields (11:04)

Right.

Emily Ketchin (11:05)

So I think that the step by

Mike Shields (11:06)

step ways of doing things that are now upended a little bit.

Emily Ketchin (11:09)

Exactly. You have a process that you've used for years and years. Enter AI and it might completely re engineer the process. So we're all having to think very differently about things. You have limitations because in the old world of marketing, something needed to be seen and then corrected and then approved and it went through a very rote process. Yeah. And that has totally been upended. So it's much more dynamic and it's really interesting to think about how the process can be changed by virtue of automation. Right. If you think about it, the other dimension that I think is super interesting and I talk about this a lot to our own teams, is this is probably the first generation of leaders who is tasked with managing an agentic workforce. Think about that. What's that going to look like? Don't sleep, don't eat. Not looking for a raise. It's super fascinating when you think about the human element and what it's been like to manage people and now we're managing agents.

Mike Shields (12:07)

You know, that's either really cool or scary, depending on your perspective. Are you finding that within your organizations people are rallying to that or wary or both?

Emily Ketchin (12:17)

There are probably elements of both. But what I will say is much stronger in our culture is leaning into it and experimenting. And because it's so intrinsic to what we do, because we really fundamentally believe in the democratization of AI, it's very important for us to be at the forefront.

Mike Shields (12:34)

Presumably, if you're working there, you are into this stuff.

Emily Ketchin (12:37)

I hope we're in IT and we're thinking about it. And I don't think there's as much perhaps trepidation. One of the things that came along with the governance council was the idea that we would do a ton of education inside the organization. And we did. And what was super fascinating is we've done this great series of trainings. People have been able to lean in, they've been able to retake the trainings. But beyond that, a couple people in the organization put up their hands and said, we're going to spin out into a group and we're going to create our own ad hoc organization that's all about AI and experimentation around AI. And what they did was set up a prompt library for our company, for our market.

Podcast Host/Narrator (13:15)

That's smart.

Emily Ketchin (13:15)

Right. On a platform that we all use all the time and it makes it so much easier to get to the answer. And so prompt engineering, that's not something any one of us would have been thinking about.

Mike Shields (13:26)

Three, four, there's no department for that.

Emily Ketchin (13:28)

Yeah, they super excited about it and they went into it and two of them led it. And there's now a database, I think, of over 250 prompts that are right there for you. So that's been hugely helpful because I think a big part of what we're learning is how do you get the best out of the AI? Well, a lot of that is how you query. Yeah. And how you work with it. Yeah.

Mike Shields (13:46)

And there is a skill there and an experience.

Emily Ketchin (13:48)

Super interesting. Yeah, absolutely.

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Mike Shields (14:48)

This massive change we're talking about amidst we've been at performance error for a long time, but now we're really. Everybody's pushing for everything to be as trackable as possible. Presumably AI helps you do that. You talk about like big sponsorships with a Formula one, FIFA, things that are not always easy to plug into a outcomes based spreadsheet. How do you reconcile those two things?

Emily Ketchin (15:11)

Yeah, it's a great question. I do think the technology helps you very much and we are super, super focused and disciplined about how we measure the impact of things like the F1. So we have a very robust measurement framework with a set of what I will call tangible and intangible metrics that really guide us to a holistic view of effectiveness. So if you take something tangible, you can look at things like your brand perception trackers, your custom brand lift studies, which we do independently for all the work that we do. And the media value, those are very straightforward. And the media value is always determined by a third party that specialize in doing that. Because I don't think you, you don't want that being done from, let's say inside the house. And then we have intangible. And so things like that would include your social media, the evaluation customers give you of the customer experience, the value of a lot of the marketing that you do, the value of the story that you're telling between your brand and the property. The F1, what is it doing technologically for us, even down to things like pipeline measurement. Right. So you want to be very technical in how you're seeing customers partake in what happens there. We've seen a 31% increase on our total media value year on year. So what that tells me is we're just getting better and we're refining about how we kind of work on that. I mentioned social. We've seen a whopping 88% increase year on year in our digital and social engagement, which has truly been led by both YouTube and Instagram. If we're still in year four of this relationship able to optimize to the degree of 31 and 88% higher results, it just goes to show you that using the technology to help you to get there makes a huge difference. And then the last thing I'll say is our brand favorability was 77% higher than those of the general population. Once you see the combination of what the F1 and our marketing efforts have done to bring that to fruition and, and I'll just say it's a huge responsibility to take this on for an organization and for a brand. You want to make sure you're tracking that and you're having the right level of conversations with your CFO so that they're also understanding what the output of that is.

Mike Shields (17:34)

They're not going to say, that's really cool. We got a great brand halo because you're an F1, that's fine. They're going to want some answers.

Emily Ketchin (17:40)

Exactly. They want to know. And there definitely are significant reviews that we go through on that front. And then we just take that from our worldwide perspective out into our GEOs. Because the beauty of something like F1 is that it happens 24 times over the course of the year and 40 weeks. So you have a long and really stable platform that you can use, which has been great.

Mike Shields (18:02)

Along those same lines, every brand is trying to figure out, you're talking about big, established media properties. Everyone's trying to figure out, we got to work with creators more. These are the new media companies, new media purveyors. I would think you guys would be able to find very targeted creators to work with on the platforms. You mentioned YouTube and Instagram. But there's also, I imagine, not a lot of established benchmarks for how to evaluate those folks or those opportunities. How do you figure that out?

Emily Ketchin (18:26)

We spend a lot of time thinking about our creator strategy and actually with our products, specifically with our yoga products. We have spent a ton of time changing the entire campaign there to be focused on the creator. What we found is that in targeting Gen Z, they want to be a part of the creative process. They don't want to be spoken at. They want to be in environments where they can feel like the audience can relate to them and can be trusted in part of that process. It's interesting. The creative process is messy sometimes. And what we have learned is that being a part of that process has actually served Us really well. One of our programs is called the Creator Odyssey, and it's a global collaborative project where digital artists from around the world and build on each other's work. It's just fascinating. We started out with one particular creator and they created this incredible, beautiful artwork, shipped it to the next creator. So this entire chain, if you will, went around the world and was able to really tell the story of creativity, put the process in the center of it. And by virtue of that, you could see the output around the product.

Mike Shields (19:38)

But talk about being non linear, like, this is definitely not typical playbook, right?

Emily Ketchin (19:42)

We didn't start with here's the product and here's what you can expect. We started with a goal which was around this collaboration and this odyssey, this journey of creativity that really, I think from my perspective, gets to genuine storytelling, which is what creators can do for you. And it creates a much stronger connection with your audiences. You also can reach multiple audiences much more organically. And we saw crazy results with that1.17 million views, 830,000 engagements, and a 10% engagement rate, which is much higher than a standard engagement rate because people wanted to be participating in the process and understanding the process. And interestingly, the campaign itself illustrates the power of that AI and that technology. I will also say that this particular project recently won the Sundance Award, the film festival as like the official brand storytelling selection for the creator audiences, which was really interesting. I'm not a big believer in going into something to win an award, but

Mike Shields (20:44)

because it was told, that's a pretty unique one.

Emily Ketchin (20:46)

It is a very unique one. It was told as a story and as a film. It gave us a lot of good validation that we were on the right track in the way that we were thinking about marketing, using creators as part of the tapestry of the stories that we're trying to tell in a very genuine, authentic way that works with our audience.

Mike Shields (21:05)

Now, presumably creators are going to help with this next question, but you mentioned earlier that you're trying to define these categories almost with consumers in various surveys. Broadly speaking, creators are not sure about ar, some of them wary of it. Oh, it's going to. It's going to mess up the economy and my job, whatever. How do you figure out how to talk about some of these things without making people nervous or turning them around a little bit, maybe.

Emily Ketchin (21:28)

I think that the biggest challenge is really to have people think, feel the value of AI and not just understanding it intellectually. Right. But what does it actually feel like. And so the approach that we've taken is to really focus on what AI enables in everyday life, how it simplifies tasks, enhances your creativity and saves time in a way that feels very intuitive and relevant. That is the way that we're talking about it and showcasing how technology is being put to work by for good, how AI can make the world a better place and enhance your lives. So it has to feel from my perspective and what we believe at Lenovo is it's got to feel personal, it's got to feel useful, and it's got to feel human. And so those are the three things I would say that are really important. And part of how we do that is with Lenovo and Motorola Kira, they connected ecosystem across our devices. That unifies them and then unifies that experience, making it much more personalized and integrated, which I think is the right way to communicate the benefits of what AI can bring to all of us.

Mike Shields (22:39)

Last one for me, Emily. We talked a lot about messaging creative and trying to use the power of creators and also just being more personalized. There are a lot of partners now that are offering this media optimization driven by AI with various degrees of control. Some of it feels black boxy to people. How do you figure out how to take advantage of that power without again giving up the control and transparency that you come to expect?

Emily Ketchin (23:03)

I mean, it harkens back to the way that we used it in the case that I discussed earlier, where we really use the AI in a responsible way to increase contextual effectiveness of our advertising. I think that's the way that you have to do it. We have a media center of excellence that we stood up about five years ago. That is the team that specializes in what are the right ways to use AI in the media optimization frame. And that's exactly how we do it. And so it has to be tried and tested. It has to be something that we think can still be used on an experimental basis. But it has to be something that either teams have worked with in the past or we understand clearly what the intent of that is and then we measure along the way. So I think you have to do it very responsibly. It's all about progress. And I think to do that you have to be willing to experiment and you have to be willing to look at the right way to do that. And having again, back to the guardrails, back to some of the things that you put into place to manage along the way, that's the most effective way to do it. And again, having specialists in the media coe has been hugely helpful for us to govern that. And so there's a big chunk of that is done in house. And then, of course, we have agency partners who help us with that as well.

Mike Shields (24:15)

So it's not all agents. No more people, no more agencies. And let it run.

Emily Ketchin (24:20)

Absolutely not. No, you have to. Really. Again, it comes back to the point around critical judgment. This is a time where that, I think, is probably more important than ever. Absolutely.

Mike Shields (24:31)

That is encouraging. Emily, awesome conversation. Thanks so much for taking the time out and let's chat again down the road.

Emily Ketchin (24:36)

Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to talk to you.

Podcast Host/Narrator (24:40)

Big thanks to my guest this week, Lenovo's Emily Ketchin, and my partners at Go Addressable and sabio. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button and we'll see you next time for more on what's Next in Media.

Mike Shields (24:53)

Thanks for listening.